Saturday, August 1, 2015

The Scent of my Mother's Kiss

Originally published in 2007 as The Little Mongrel - free to a good home, and now revised as The Scent of my Mother’s Kiss, this 394 page book includes a new chapter on Rock Lynn House, a Salvation Army Maternity Home in West Launceston, Tasmania, that operated between 1900 and 1960. Opinions on adoption vary, depending on which side of the triangle you're sitting on. This book has been written from the perspective of an adoptee, tracing her formative years from the blank slate of birth to the verge of adulthood and the relentless search for the key that would erase the debilitating fugue of not knowing

This book contains references to and gives insight into the day to day practices and operation of to Rock Lynn House, Regent House, Elsternwick, Mt St Canice, Hobart, Winbirra Remand Centre and Winlaton Training Centre.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

This is my last post on this
subject for a while. I wanted to do the initial research for this novel and then
let it rest while I worked on other much neglected projects. I’m pleased with
the information I now have and how this fits within the character framework of
the intended novel.

PDs are expert in making
you doubt yourself and the abuse. This self-doubt leads you to mistrust your own instincts and interpretation of events. One of the techniques used is Gaslighting,
where constant emotional invalidation become the norm. It is a technique
abusers use to convince you that your perception of the abuse is inaccurate, where
false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt their
own memory, perception and sanity and to think the abuse is indeed their own fault
or that it never even took place.

On a previous post I touched
briefly on what happens to some people who are victims of smear campaigns:

They may become alienated from their family and friends.

They lose contact with their children for months or even
years.

They may lose their jobs.

They may spend tens of thousands of dollars or more fighting
false accusations of the BP attacking them.

They may have restraining orders placed upon them based upon
false accusations.

I am grateful to those who have contacted me
privately with anecdotal accounts of their own abuse and the impact this has had on
a deeper, personal level. There are many similarities in these stories, which tell
of:

Living in a state of constant stress and anxiety (even
during periods of inaction by the smear campaigner)

Ongoing depression and a sense of hopelessness.

A loss of trust in
others.

Becoming emotionally crippled.

A loss of sense of self and their place in the world.

Debilitating low self esteem.

Lack of self confidence.

Experience of social isolation, and feelings of alienation
and social isolation.

Fear.

Loss of reputation.

Hyper-vigilance(on constant alert).

Feeling jumpy and easily startled.

Many touched upon what the PD in
their situation failed to realize, that if their aim had been to ruin the
victim’s life through extreme ‘punishing’ or ‘pay back’, this had been achieved,
and even a cessation of the smear campaign and other threatening behaviour would
never restore the victim to their former state of well-being or anything close
to this.

For many, the damage done had been absolute.

If you or someone you know is experiencing these or other mental health issues, support is available at:

Co-dependency - A relationship in which an otherwise
mentally-healthy person is controlled or manipulated by another who is affected
by an addiction or mental illness.

Cognitive Dissonance - A psychological term for the
discomfort that most people feel when they encounter information which
contradicts their existing set of beliefs or values. People who suffer from
personality disorders often experience cognitive dissonance when they are
confronted with evidence that their actions have hurt others or have
contradicted their stated morals.

Confirmation Bias - The tendency to pay more attention to
things which reinforce your beliefs than to things which contradict them.

Cyberpath – A Cyberpath is an online predator or psychopath
who uses the internet to recruit, stalk, abuse or exploit their victims.

Depersonalize - to make impersonal or to deprive of
personality or individuality.

Depression - People who suffer from personality disorders
are often also diagnosed with symptoms of depression. Targets of smear
campaigns may also suffer debilitating depression.

Emotional Abuse - Any pattern of behaviour directed at one
individual by another which promotes in them a destructive sense of Fear,
Obligation or Guilt (FOG).

Frivolous Litigation - The use of unmerited legal
proceedings to hurt, harass or gain an economic advantage over an individual or
organization.

Harassment - Any sustained or chronic pattern of unwelcome behaviour
by one individual towards another.

Instrumentality - Instrumentality is when a person is
treated like a tool for another person's own purposes.

Intimidation - Any form of veiled, hidden, indirect or
non-verbal threat.

Invalidation - The creation or promotion of an environment or
situation that encourages an individual to believe that their thoughts,
beliefs, values or physical presence are inferior, flawed, problematic or
worthless.

Lack of Conscience - Individuals who suffer from Personality
Disorders are often preoccupied with their own agendas, sometimes to the
exclusion of the needs and concerns of others. This is sometimes interpreted by
others as a lack of moral conscience.

Lightbulb Moment - A Lightbulb Moment is the description
many non-personality-disordered individuals use when they first discover the
existence of personality disorders. For the first time, they have discovered a
plausible explanation for the strange and frightening behaviours of a family
member who suffers from a personality disorder and learn that their situation
is not uncommon. It is as if a light were just turned on.

Manipulation - The practice of steering an individual into a
desired behaviour for the purpose of achieving a hidden personal goal.

Name-Calling - Use of profane, derogatory or dehumanizing
terminology to describe another individual or group. This is one of the most
common tactics people use to hurt others or disparage them. It often occurs
when someone has an emotional argument to make with little or no supporting
logical argument.

Normalizing - Normalizing is a tactic used to desensitize an
individual to abusive, coercive or inappropriate behaviours. In essence,
normalizing is the manipulation of another human being to get them to agree to,
or accept something that is in conflict with the law, social norms or their own
basic code of behaviour.

Objectification - The practice of treating a person or a
group of people like an object.

Projection - The act of attributing one's own feelings or
traits to another person and imagining or believing that the other person has
those same feelings or traits.

Proxy Recruitment - A way of controlling or abusing another
person by manipulating other people into unwittingly ‘doing the dirty work’.

Self-Victimization - Casting oneself in the role of a
victim.

Stunted Emotional Growth - A difficulty, reluctance or inability
to learn from mistakes, work on self-improvement or develop more effective
coping strategies.

Targeted Humour, Mocking and Sarcasm - Any sustained pattern
of joking, sarcasm or mockery which is designed to reduce another individual’s
reputation in their own eyes or in the eyes of others.

Unchosen - Unchosen's are people who are in a family
relationship with a person who suffers from a personality disorder. They are
called "unchosen" because they had no choice in entering into that
relationship. Unchosen's include children, parents, siblings or relatives of a
person who suffers from a personality disorder.

Monday, March 9, 2015

Tomorrow I intend to post a Personality Disorder Glossary, but
for today I want to look more closely at two entries from this:

Depersonalisation - to make impersonal or to deprive of
personality or individuality

Objectification - to treat a person as a thing. To degrade to the status of a mere object.

I realize I’ve been guilty, in a
writerly sort of way, of depersonalising the antagonist in this novel. This has
not been through intent to deprive him of his personality, but from a writer’s
habit in the planning of a novel of referring to the part a character will play
– a distance relationship before we get inside the story and the mind of the characters. To
remedy this I'll call the characters, the main ones that is, by name from now
on – calling the antagonist by his name, Julius, and the protagonist as Ruth.

This takes me back to the previously
mentioned glossary entries, Depersonalize and Objectification, and Julius’ use
of these to define his target as an object of loathing, as a thing (not a
person) to be scorned.

This almost makes sense when you
think about it. A non BP parent may have a pet name for a child, one they use in
everyday interaction that implies a close relationship and affection, however,
should the child offend or have cause to be disciplined, the parent reverts to
use of the given forename. While there are a number of sound reasons for this,
setting boundaries, sending clear messages etc. it is most often anger that
robs the tongue of the usual endearment or familiarity.

Take the case of a non BP husband angry
with his wife. He may usually call her Babe or Honey but, in the heat of
negative emotion, he can’t bring himself to address her with this intimacy,
taking a step back to make sure she understands the depth of his anger.

In both of these examples the
lapse is temporary, even when taken to the extreme and accompanied by abuse and
insults, and the affection returns once the crisis has passed.

In other situations the person
experiencing the anger will remove themselves from the relationship for a while
through choice of words:

…your child, your brother,
sister, father, mother etc. and this can be taken further using objectification
and name calling, attacking the very foundations of human interaction. Your
child can be become your bloody child; the dickhead, garbage guts, etc.

Used
often enough, these names tend to stick and can even worsen in time as the
abuser seeks to further demean and depersonalise.

While Depersonalisation and
Objectification may have not been a conscious decision on Julius’ part
initially, his extreme unresolved anger and heightened or exaggerated
perception of having been wronged, made it difficult, if not impossible, for
him to maintain the previous intimacy of using Ruth’s forename. She became thebitch, the evil bitch, the lying bitch, and those around not only failed to
challenge this, they became so inured it formed part of their own everyday
speech and language choice.

This is another example of how PD's groom of recruits to their cause, desensitising them beyond normal moral and ethical constraints that govern human interaction.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

I don’t want to spend any time at
the moment cogitating over title alternatives, but I came across a word in
my keyboard travels yesterday that could be a contender – Unchosen.

This is a term used to describe
people who are part of a family network that includes a person who suffers from
a personality disorder (PD). They are called Unchosen because they had no
choice in entering into that relationship and may include children, parents,
siblings or extended family of a person with a PD. They are the unwilling,
often initially unknowing, participants in a smear campaign.

In this novel the protagonist is
the Unchosen; the target of the BP antagonist’s sustained smear and fear campaign that forms the
outline of the story.

It's an interesting concept, but in this post I wanted to summarise my findings on adult grooming and recruitment and use of Psychological Projection.

Adult Grooming is correspondent
to child grooming and applies to any situation where an adult is primed to
allow him or herself to be exploited or abused. While it is a common assumption
that grooming is only practiced on the very young, identical emotional and
psychological processes are commonly used to abuse or exploit adults. By
careful selection of words and posturing, recruits are groomed do much of the
dirty work for the BP, unaware, having been persuaded by the BP’s rendition of
truth. They take up the cause align themselves against the target.

The smear campaigner
frequently engineers situations in which
abuse is inflicted by another person and recruits friends, colleagues, family
members, authorities, or any other third party to do their work for them, using
them to threaten, stalk, convince, harass
and otherwise manipulate the target. Carefully crafted scenarios of embarrassment
and humiliation provoke social sanctions of condemnation, contempt, social
exclusion and shame against the target.

Defamation of character and
destroying the credibility of the target is the ultimate goal, while convincing
others that the target is the persecutor and they are the victim. Through use
of Projection (see below), the BP conducting the smear campaign, while perpetuating
constant, residual torment, claim they are in fact being tormented by their
target, creating rescuers who then take up their cause, believing they are
protecting the BP from the ‘bully’. Usually, the claims the BP makes about her
target are the truth, but about their own thoughts and actions.

When a person has uncomfortable
thoughts, feelings, or even behaviours, they may project these onto other
people, assigning the thoughts or feelings that they need to repress to a
convenient alternative target. Psychological Projection is a theory in
psychology in which humans defend themselves against unpleasant impulses by
denying their existence in themselves, while attributing them to others. For
example, a person who is a bully may accuse other people of being bullies. Projection
tends to come to the fore in normal people at times of crisis, but is more
commonly found in personalities functioning at a primitive level as in
narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder.

Friday, March 6, 2015

Paranoia Unleashed - the making of the novel

So far it has been established that the antagonist (yet to be named) in this novel has, at the least, a Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and as a significant part of the intended action centres on a smear campaign conducted by the antagonist against family members
over a period of years, today’s post follows that theme and I will expand on
this in the following days. This is part of building the character of the antagonist to get it right from the onset.

Smear campaigns are considered one of the classic behaviours
of BPDs and the target is the person against whom the perpetrator conducts the
vilification. Quite often this is against people who have stood up against some
form of unfairness, abuse, or entitlement. These campaigns are often done
behind the scenes against people who are or were related or emotionally close
to the perpetrator and it may
start months or even years before the target is aware it is happening.The intent is to destroy their reputation and
relationships with family, friends and with community contacts and may extend
to forcing the target to leave the community, putting them in prison, or even killing them.

As with so many things involving BPs and their typical
inability to understand or respect boundaries, there really are no limits. They
will use basically any means available to them to cause damage to their target,
including denigration, endless disparaging remarks, fabrication, false
accusations, and even grooming others to lie on their behalf as part of their campaign.

A smear campaign involves lies, exaggerations, and
cultivation of mistrust toward the victim by playing on the sensibilities of
others, using people’s empathy and morals to turn them against the victims –
most often for having done nothing more than disagree with the smearer. Many are passive participants who will listen and
believe the lies they are told, while others become actively involved in spreading them
further. The target may find that there are dozens of people, many of whom they have
never met, who believe and repeat the lies they have been told. This is the
insidious nature of the smear campaign.

Smear campaigners try to ostracize their victims and
make them feel alone, unpopular, and unsupported by others while they play the
victim, the hero, or both, manipulating others to think they are good people
who are rightfully standing up against the victim’s supposed immorality or
abuse.

Smear campaigners insinuate that the victim is
mentally ill, unreasonable, incompetent, untrustworthy, or abusive and they
enjoy the feeling of having gotten back
at their victims, believing it is completely justifiable – even fun – to
mistreat someone for having an opinion that is different from theirs.

Smear campaigners do not acknowledge the wrong they
do, and cannot typically be expected to genuinely confess or apologize — even
after they’ve been proven liars.

Having established this element of the antagonist's character, this is probably as good a time as any to touch briefly on what happens to the people who are victims of these campaigns.

They are alienated from their family and friends.

They lose contact with their children for months or
even years.

They may lose their jobs.

They may spend tens of thousands of dollars or more
fighting false accusations of the BP attacking them.

They may have restraining orders placed upon them based
upon false accusations.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

After several years researching and writing family history, I’m in the
preliminary stages of planning a new novel, a psycho thriller with a working
title of Paranoia Unleashed.

While I've loosely plotted the story-line, this won’t be a ‘tap and
go’ writing process, as it’s my intention to spend as much time as it takes in researching personality disorders and behaviours, and the impact of these on those around them, in an endeavour to understand the dynamics within the PPD's family.

I will be posting my progress on this blog and inviting comment or
opinion from others more closely associated with the subject as the project
develops.

In Paranoia Unleashed, the protagonist has a Paranoid Personality
Disorder (PPD). This is the anguish-filled normality of his life that impels
him to seek retribution for slights against him, real or imagined, going to
inordinate lengths to create ‘evidence’ to substantiate his claims of
persecution.

This, in turn becomes part
of the ‘grooming kit’ he uses to isolate and control others in order to validate the beliefs
formed by his paranoia.

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

The Hidden Risks -

a story of concealment and loss of family name

A history of the the descendants of Henry Stagg and Elizabeth Biven Coakes of Meander in Tasmania, this book follows the lives of several transported convicts and their descendants.

When a young woman, Florence Risk, dies in 1917, her children are separated and all traces of her life buried with her in an unmarked grave under a miss-pelt name. One child, Kenneth, is raised by a maternal great-aunt. She gives him a new identity to shield him from the social stigma of being an illegitimate, mixed race child, effectively expunging his Middle Eastern ancestry. His two older brothers are placed in state care and denied return to their father's home. In this book, the layers of the past are uncovered to re-unite the Risk family and to integrate past and present.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Why pay in excess of $100.00 for refurbished or new plastic ribbon shades for your black lady lamps when you can make your own for less than $10.00.

This simple 'how to' guide for making plastic ribbon lamp shades for retro lamp bases, tells you where to source materials and gives step by step instructions for a basic shade. Includes information on Barsony and Kalmar ceramics, many colour illustrations and refurbishment hints for Barsony lamp bases.

This 58 page book will be for sale on Amazon within the next few days at a bargain price of $19.99 US with Kindle version free when you order a print copy or $4.99 US on its own.

Friday, August 15, 2014

In the past week I've begun to read two books. I never finished either of them.

The first, an historical novel written in 1976 by a famed and multi
award winning Australian writer, the second, a recent publication and fourth
book by an Australian writer. Both lost me almost at the first quotation mark
because the dialogue lacked credibility.

With the first book
there is dialogue on the second page between two Tasmanian Aboriginals pre-European
settlement, written as spoken in articulate high-educated English. Although the unnaturalness
of this jarred, I accepted it as one might accept a translation from
an unknown language, squirming a little as the speculative speech between these proud people was reduced to class-valued
interpretation. Two pages over, when the daughter of the former was speaking, the
dialogue had been written in the worst interpretation of pidgin English I’ve ever
read, making an intelligent woman sound like a complete simpleton. At this
point I found I could not take the book seriously. I felt insulted on behalf of
the historical figure being portrayed and embarrassed for the writer despite
her fame. I closed the book.

The second book, also
speculative non-fiction of early Tasmanian history, had been extensively researched.
It had a strong story line that stood out above the telling rather than showing
narrative, but the dialogue was, for the most part, quite unbelievable for the
era and setting. There was also an issue with consistency, i.e. in one string
of dialogue, ‘here’, is written with a dropped aitch (‘ere), two lines down the
aitch is pronounced, then the same word is misspelt as, ‘ear, in the next. Dialogue,
as an extension of characters, needs to be above all true and consistent. What
really stood out for me in this book though, was the phrase, ‘man up’, which
has been around for less than a decade, suddenly thrown in as dialogue between
characters. At this point I lost interest in reading further, conceding that,
while I’d wasted money in buying this book, I didn’t have to waste time in
reading it.

There are many aspects to writing dialogue if it is to be
believable and, when used well, it is an excellent technique for injecting needed
breaks into numerous action scenes, long narrative and/or descriptive passages. Unfortunately, writing realistic dialogue proves to
be one of the most difficult aspects of the creative writing process for some writers and without this, readers can quickly lose
interest as such false notes often distract from the essence of the story.

Friday, June 20, 2014

It's two months since my last post - a dead stop in the middle of two challenges - the A-Z of Blogging and NaPoWriMo. Without mention of all the other challenges of life that get in the way of regular blogging, I think the timing of this latest hiatus says a lot about taking on too much at the one time and the need to set achievable writing related goals.

Blogger absenteeism is comparable to school truancy, where each day off compounds the issue, putting an ever-increasing gap between student and education. It's like jumping off a playground carousel, watching it spin and being unable to time the leap back on.

So, after watching the spinning of the carousel of time, I've made the leap back on to a blog that's lost its spin, hoping I can find the momentum to set it in motion once more before it spits me off again.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Yesterday we had a trip out of town to pick up two chairs we’d
purchased on EBay, very nice retro yellow and grey to match our recently renovated
kitchen. Deciding not to waste the long trip we combined several activities into
the day, shopping at stores not available in the small town we live in. First
stop Bunnings garden centre, a sort of retail heaven for me. A red grape,
several punnets of seedlings (including our favourite nasturtiums), a hibiscus
to fill the gap down the drive and a slow dawdle down the herb aisle. I’d
picked up two pots of thyme and was hanging about the salvias when a lady
struck up a conversation about these plants, pointing me in the direction of
one that had caught my eye earlier and telling me of its bird attracting qualities.
Two of my weaknesses – plants and birds and I was sold, picking up another just
for good measure.

We still had an hour or so before chair pick up time so
drove across town to a shopping centre for lunch and a browse. My husband
needed more canvases and I needed more, well more of anything if it was a
bargain, a use for which could be worked out later, such is the serendipitous
nature of idle shopping. Lunch was pretty ordinary, a dried out eggplant quiche
and a side serve of limp salad, but the coffee was to die for. I saw two people
with familiar faces while we were having lunch, one a younger man with a gaunt
face I’d almost spoken to when his blank look told me the recognition wasn’t
reciprocated. It was then I realised he’d been one of the contestants of The Biggest
Loser TV show that recently finished. And I won’t say any more on the subject
of this ‘reality’ show for fear of litigant action. The other person was immediately
recognisable, and I was still trying to put a name to the face when I realised
who it was staring back at me. I’d been staring at my own reflection in an adjacent
mirror. Embarrassed at my elderliness, I returned my focus to the limp salad
and conversation with my husband, who thankfully I could still recognise.

Then it was time to set off for Nintingbool and the chairs.
I’d scrawled some vague directions on a scrap of paper that thought I could
decipher when the time came, and I almost could apart from a slight mix up with
a couple of roundabouts. One phone call and a short detour later we arrived as
a house in the country with a beautiful welcoming garden edging the long drive
to the house. Here we met the friendly Sandy, who offered us coffee and cake with
that country friendliness you don’t see that often these days and we loaded the
chairs into the car. As we opened the back of the wagon she spotted our earlier
purchases from Bunnings, asking what plants we’d purchased, leading on to a
discussion on gardening in general. She then asked if I liked irises, canna
lilies and belladonna lilies. I said yes and before I could turn around she was
digging up her garden beds and handing me plants to place in plastic bags for
the trip home.

We left with much thanking and arm waving to find our way
home, not caring too much if we got lost or otherwise side-tracked, still under
the spell of Nintingbool niceness.

Monday, April 14, 2014

Quite without realising it – and I admit there’s a lot I don’t
realise these days, I committed to National Poetry Month (USA) and the April
A-Z blogging challenge. The former requires a poem written each day and the
latter writing every day to a topic beginning with the letter for that day.

Today’s letter is L
and I find I’ve completely missed A-K so it comes as no surprise that I find
myseLf over-Layered with unmet commitments. Laminous.

Swamped, and drowning in a sea of good intentions, confident I can make landfaLL before the
end of each day, but I can’t swim against the tide and find myseLf caught in the rips of everyday Living. FLoundering in the depths of Life.

Other unmet projects rise up to taunt me, as Lifebuoys that fLoat beyond my grasp, and I yearn for the steady progress of the Longer, known work. No poems written on
the hop, nor Letters of the aLphabet frowning to be written to, just
the pLodding of the long distance
writer.